Behold the Flaming Carrot! The Flaming Carrot? This bizarre superhero
and the Mystery Men are the creation of Bob Burden and appear every month
in the pages of Dark Horse Comics. Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo, Hank
Azaria, Paul Reubens, Geoffrey Rush, Lena Olin, Kel Mitchell, Wes Studi,
Greg Kinnear, Tom Waits, Claire Forlani, and William H. Macy are all part
of the large, star studded ensemble cast of the new movie based on Burden's
creation. Unlike other superheroes, the Mystery Men are not world famous.
They are just ordinary guys trying to be superheroes, albeit not too successfully.

Thanks to Captain Amazing (Kinnear, You've Got Mail), crime in
Champion City is close to nonexistent. Now, Amazing worries about more
mundane matters such as product endorsements. Amazing decides that to
make himself more attractive to large rich corporations, he again needs
to fight the good fight. He releases his arch nemesis Casanova Frankenstein
(Rush, Shakespeare In Love), who then proceeds to capture Amazing.
The only people who can rescue Amazing are Mr. Furious (Stiller, Your
Friends and Neighbors), a man whose anger derives from his level of
anger, the Shoveler (Macy, Fargo) who wields a shovel, and the
Blue Rajah (Azaria, Godzilla), a man with an English accent who
throws forks and spoons (but no knives!) and, oddly enough, wears no blue.
They are joined by the Bowler (Garofalo, 200 Cigarettes), a young
woman with the head of her father encased in a bowling ball, Invisible
Boy (Mitchell, Good Burger), who can only turn invisible when no
one is looking, the Spleen (Reubens, Pee-Wee Herman!), with the power
of projectile flatulence, and the Sphinx (Studi, Deep Rising),
who constantly is proclaiming nonsensical sayings. Together, these heroes
must learn to overcome their obvious inadequacies to overcome evil and
save the day.

Director Kinka Usher (the same man behind the Taco Bell Chihuahua commercials)
does what he can with the script by Burden, Neil Cuthbert, and Brent Forrester.
The style Usher uses in commercials also works well with the comic book
action. The look of the film is great. Champion City is futuristic and
ominous; a sort of middle ground between the initial dark Batman movies,
and the later campy ones. The costumes look very amateurish and spliced
together, as they should. The story is a mixed bag. It is a very simple
story, stretched out to almost two hours. Certain stretches of the movie
don't really have a purpose; they just serve as filler between major plot
developments. The humor derives from the movie not taking itself too seriously,
which is a good thing. Most of it is from petty bickering amongst the
heroes, and of course, fart jokes, which begin to wear thin after a while.
Mystery Men seems to be a movie that tries, but not hard enough.